‘Corpse Point’ In the Arctic Is Melting, Disturbing Centuries-Old Bodies
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The Abstract<br>‘Corpse Point’ In the Arctic Is Melting, Disturbing Centuries-Old Bodies
Becky Ferreira
May 23, 2026<br>at 9:00 AM
Whalers buried in the Norwegian Arctic in the 1600s and 1700s are thawing out of the permafrost, underscoring the threat of climate change to archaeological sites around the world.
A grave close to a slope at “Corpse Point” in Svalbard, Norway. Image: Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin Therese
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that felt the heat, left their mark, survived a cataclysm, and watched cows watch TV.<br>First, the bones of long-dead whalers are spilling out their Arctic graves due to human-driven climate change. Then: a trip to “where the snakes lost life,” an ur-moon in the ashes, and the facial recognition abilities of cows.<br>As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.<br>The thaw at “Corpse Point”<br>Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin Therese. “Skeletons in the permafrost: Exploring climate-driven heritage loss and occupational health at the early modern whaling burial site of Likneset, Svalbard.” PLOS One.<br>The battered bones of beleaguered whalers buried centuries ago in the Arctic are melting out of their permafrost graves due to human-driven climate change, according to a new study. The remains of these men, who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries, reveal the physical toll of whaling on sailors, and highlight the urgent need to preserve cultural heritage as global temperatures rise.<br>Climate change is an obvious danger to future generations, but it also threatens our link to the past by accelerating the erosion and degradation of its material remains. This problem affects all kinds of different archaeological sites, from ancient artifacts preserved in vanishing Mongolian glaciers to the oldest rock art on record in Indonesia, which is rapidly decaying in the heat 45,000 years after it was painted.<br>Graves at “Corpse Point” showing some of the textiles have eroded in recent decades. Image: Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin ThereseNowhere is more affected by warming trends than the Arctic, where temperatures are rising nearly four times faster than the global average. Now, a pair of researchers has examined the remains of European whalers at the Likneset whaling burial site on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, also known as “Corpse Point.” The team discovered significant degradation of many burials since they were first documented in the 1970s, a loss that has been sped up by climate change.<br>“The site has been excavated repeatedly over more than three decades, providing a rare opportunity to examine both preservation change and human skeletal evidence through time and across contrasting burial environments within a single site,” said authors Lise Loktu of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research and Elin Therese Brødholt of Oslo University Hospital.<br>“In several cases, coffin lids had collapsed and sideboards were displaced, resulting in partial disturbance of skeletal remains and textiles,” the team said. “One grave (Grave 214) is classified as completely destroyed, with coffin elements and skeletal remains dispersed downslope.”<br>Textiles were in a better state of preservation in less exposed graves. Image: Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin ThereseThese whalers just can’t get any peace, even in death. Their lives were short and filled with physical hardships, according to the team’s re-examination of the bones. Many individuals endured physical trauma due to chronic strain, and 18 out of 19 of the studied sailors suffered from scurvy. Most of the bones belong to men who died in their 20s or early 30s.<br>“The predominance of healed injuries indicates survival after traumatic events and suggests that mortality within the assemblage was more closely related to cumulative physiological stress than to acute fatal trauma,” according to the study.<br>“The results from Likneset…call into question the long-term viability of in situ preservation and managed decay under warming permafrost conditions,” the team concluded. Future work to address this problem “should be guided by clearly defined knowledge priorities: which information must be documented and analysed before it is irretrievably lost?”<br>In other news…<br>The mystery of Ndalambiri<br>Mesfin, Isis et al. "A new archaeological chrono-cultural sequence for the rock art site of Ndalambiri, Cuanza Sul, Angola" Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.<br>For at least 45,000 years, humans have gathered at Ndalambiri, a rockshelter in Angola thought to be named for an Umbundu phrase that means, “This...